Which legendaries and epics do you think are under-powered and why?
Can you compare them to a different epic/legendary that’s in a good state of balance?
This thread will help both the devs see if there are any extreme out-liers in terms of bad items, as well as give me feedback for Cornucopia.
Most high level epics are worthless imo, especially epic sets, no one is going to use them in any build, ever.
Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t understand why the Markovian set doesn’t any OA/DA bonuses :eek:
Also Laviathan is basically Stonefist Rebuke with barely higher DPS and a useless skill, ugh, pls buff.
Hybrid items annoy me a lot since pets builds aren’t really viable unless you go all in. Things like that Modrogen epic set, I sigh when I find a piece of it because it’s just vendor trash. Glyph of Kelphat’Zoth is another example, I dismantle every one I find on principle.
For my blade arc character I’m a bit annoyed that a level 50 legendary is the best weapon possible.
Edit: Necromancer’s Deathgrips. Those spirits are pretty and do basically nothing. I have struggled to find a use for this item, it looks promising at first. But after an hour of thinking about it, meh.
Definitely agree on Necromancer’s Deathgrips, mostly because of the proc being designed for pet builds but doesnt proc off of pet kills. This and the revenant devotion are a bit underwhelming because a non pet build won’t use them and a pet build is unable to consistently use them because it is very rare that a pet character will secure a kill on something when competing with their pets for damage. Also agree that a lot of epic items could use a second look. It’s kind of a shame that it makes more sense to use rares and legendaries in every slot and not really use empowered epics or epic sets, except maybe empowered legplates of valor and then there are a few empowered epics that pets use, like the grimoire.
Obsidian Juggernaut has an odd granted skill. It seems like an item you might want to build around but then you don’t get + skill bonuses like you would if you just invested in Forcewave+Tremor and did some physical->chaos conversion. Then if you pick it up for a Witchblade not focusing in Forcewave it really doesn’t provide any added bonus utility that you shouldn’t already have. It has no cooldown, indicating its supposed to be spammed, but the energy cost is high and it benefits from cast speed; neither of which you’re really going to be setup for if you’re a melee Witchblade anyway. It might be decent if it were balanced around a Cooldown or worked as a proc instead.
Well, legendaries are one tier up from empowered epics, so it does make sense.
Also, you seem to come at this from the perspective of having all items available. If you do not find that legendary, you might be using the empowered epic for quite some time 
Yeah, you’re right. I’ve been playing a long time and have farmed up quite a bit while playing, so pretty much when I want to make a build I have the items I need to make it work. So I guess that makes me pretty out of touch with how most people would play, and why they wouldn’t agree with my assessment of empowered epics or epic sets.
I feel the legendary rings in general feel a bit lacking. Some fit a very niche position and a lot of them easily compete with empowered epics.
On a few of my hybrid pet builds I use “Wildpact Emerald” a lot. I’ve got a “block proc” build I’m working on and obviously I want “Empowered Sentinel’s Seal” as the legendary rings don’t really offer much for shields. etc etc.
For the most part though. I feel most of the gear is fine. None of the legendary shields offer +%chance to block either but most of them offer other great bonuses.
I like your work doomgod, so I’m going to try to explain what I see as the basic formula of legendary design in this game.
2-4 damage types that synergize together in some way, cold/lite/frostburn/electrocute Vitality/Poison/acid etc.
Usually, its 2 damage types and their respective DoT damage type.
+2-4 to two different random skills. When I use the term “random” I mean support skills that very often don’t benefit from having +skills. At best, it gives you a few extra skillpoints because you can unspec them down to their max level. The best legendaries don’t do this, they give +1 to all skills or +1-2 to a specific mastery. The best Item that still follows the usual formula is that chest that gives like +4 to DEE, but thats en exception to the rule, the only other skill that I know of that gets that kind of treatment is PRM. Most skills do not have a +4 legendary, and the ones that do have support talents that are basically as much a part of the skill as the main skill itself, so +1 to mastery would still be as good (sometimes better.)
1-3 seemingly random stats. Sometimes they are things like Offensive ability, resists, life, things that pretty much every character needs. This is usually the part that decides the quality of the legendary. Let’s look at iskandra’s vestments, Its good because it gives a very large amount of life, chaos resistance, +2 to maiven’s (not very impressive but its one of those skills that means you get 2 more skill points to work with usually. It gives damage too, but because all damage in this game is additive pretty much, that’s not what defines whether a piece is good or not, and I rarely even care what damage types an item has.
If you want to break away from this formula and actually put some effort into your legendary design, then I’m all for it! Try giving +skills to masteries instead, or at least skills that define that mastery in more ways. i.e. you can change something like “blitz” to “cadence” and suddenly that item becomes not just much better, but more interesting. Avoid overflowing the new skills with stuff like “flame touched” because that skill is pretty much just an OA and damage buff, and its not interesting because you might as well be giving us OA and damage on the item at that point. (unless you want to limit that bonus to demos)
A fundamental problem with the game is that all the damage except +to (insert enemy type here) is additive. That’s a big reason why legendaries are boring, because getting more of this does very little for high level characters.If you just changed it so that bonuses from gear were multiplicative, you could then lower values on legendaries but the damage that you’d get from gear would be far more meaningful. Another thing you can do is to try to put more enemy damage on gear, because those stats are incredibly powerful due to them being multiplicative.
The easy way out is just to put OA, Speed, and life on all the legendaries that don’t have good stats on them, that’s what crate did with augments, just add hp to the bad ones.
First of all let me say I find this thread extremely interesting. Now, in order to have an objective perspective on the various epic/legendary items that exist in GD, one should not only have all of them, but actually test them in order to determine if some fill some “out of the box” niche build or not. Since I actually have all legendaries in the game, I will try to point out what I believe to be the true outliers:
1. Touch of Purity - by far the worst legendary item in the game. Prima facie, it seems this item was designed for multiplayer or a Conjurer full pet build in singleplayer. However it has an enormous problem: it doesn’t cleanse existing DoTs. While it is true that 1.0.0.4. drastically reduced DoT values in Ultimate, Touch of Purity is still bad because it is only a prophylactic item.
Solution: - make the item CLEANSE all existing DoTs while keeping the reduced duration for future ones.
Footpads of the Grey Magi - problem of this item is that a warlock will prefer Wraithwalkers in 99.9% of the cases. The 100% reduced entrapment duration is nice… however the proc on the item is very bad because it offers just movement speed.
Solution: - make the proc offer also 100% resistance to sleep and 100% reduced stun duration. This also goes hand in hand with the description of the proc, viz. “with a boost of adrenaline, you distance yourself from your enemies.” Adrenaline (or epinephrine) is a cathecolamine that increases the activity of the symphathetic nervous system…as such, I don’t see why it would make you move faster but offer 0 resist vs. narcotics/sedatives (i.e. sleep/stun).
Necromancer’s Deathgrips - everything has already been said about this item…
Solution: : make it proc with 50% chance on enemy death or reduce the cooldown to 3 seconds (from 4).
I was thinking the same thing reading though these posts. While, it is true, BiS is rarely epic level, Epics are MUCH easier to come by and offer nice stop gaps until you’re lucky enough to get the legendary item to drop (or give up and just hit the trade forums to get it:rolleyes:).
I made a post in another thread regarding the uniques in GD. I don’t know how far you’re willing to take the item changes since you guys say you want to stay in line with Crate’s design choices, but I always felt the unique item design was very bland.
The poster Lance above highlights the issue: almost all the damage items follow the same trend, seeing something break away from that formula as he says would make the items significantly more interesting.
Self-quote:
I’m not sure what your plans for rebalancing the items are, but one feature I found lacking in GD are general-purpose items that have affixes that are appealing to most builds.
Most GD items are highly specific to one or two classes or combination thereof, but there are relatively few that work for many.
The few that are there, such as the Badge mentioned above, or the Peerless Eye of B. are almost instantly the best option without exception, because they simply have no good competitors.
I do hope that your answer to that issue (which I bet you’ve already noticed) is not to simply nerf the above to make them less desirable.Personally what I’d like to see are more options in that regard, especially when it comes to +skills, particularly in item slots that normally don’t provide that (such as gloves, boots, etc.) This would also make them truly “unique” in that sense.
Currently, the sets are almost unbeatable because of the +2 to class skills and at least one other major bonus they provide, even if the set isn’t that good for your class as in my case.Having some more options out there would be great, especially ones with unique bonuses as mentioned above would make the game more interesting to me.
The current uniques generally follow the same trend but with different resistance/damage types, which is the major reason why many of them are so bland: it’s the same thing over and over.Compare it to some items from Diablo 2 for example, if you’ve played that. Remember the Frostburn gloves? They added 40% to your Mana pool which was something no other item in the game did, which made it singular in that respect.
That didn’t make it the only option though, because there were other choices you could go for if you didn’t need the Mana.There was also an armor that would freeze the targets you hit. Maybe in this day and age that would be considered overpowered, but it was a very unique effect and a low level item so you could see how it altered your gameplay if you found it.
Or heck, take TQ: that game had a mace with a high piercing ratio like no other, but it was also grossly overpowered because of some of the things you could do in that game.
Back to GD, one thing I could see is an item that has the purging effect from the Arcanist tree. The game has a lot of lethal debuffs and DoTs but the player has virtually no way of removing them, I always felt that that was one of the greater flaws of the game.
Having one or more items that granted you that ability would make them unique and desirable, to name an idea.
Nailed the uselessness of Epic/Empowered sets especially sets with lots of pieces. As someone mentioned, Epics are stepping stones before legendary to temporarily fix a character’s weakness at some point, however, once you have completed a set, it is almost guaranteed that you will have much better items at some slots of the set.
No one will ever equip a whole Epic set at any point in time because:
Love the breakdown by Lance and agree with Weyu. This is what I feel about the core itemization problem in GD. The item designs are very generic and the uniqueness only comes from the proc (if any). The “design formula” makes both the affix mix and the affix range quite narrow.
The craziness of having an outlier affix like 200% DA boot or +3 all skill gloves in TQ is what makes itemization interesting. Though I am not suggesting to make an affix absolutely OP as in TQ, but the current item design is too bland in terms of affixes.
Well as a relatively new player (normal, level 47) the itemization in general is terrible. Everything seem hybridized. For me, anyway…full demo gunslinger, physical and fire. I find myself generally stuck with items at least 10 full levels below me, and half the time yellows are better than epics for my build. It’s kind of burning me out on the game tbh, and I say this as someone who hailed it as one of the top 5 of all time for the first few days of play.
What do you mean by hybridized, two masteries ? That is the norm, that you are one only is the exception and quite frankly not a good idea…
That boot was a bug, not design…
yes, way too meaningful for balance imo.
I’d like damage from Cunning / Spirit to multiply though, that gets rid of the ‘put everything in Physique’ crowd
More items that do weird things like Albrechts Duality would be nice. Granted, damage conversion isn’t exactly special but it’s mostly physical to magical. Magical type to another magical type can create whole new builds although even those items are not that great (Blood Orb comes to mind).
Another crazy idea I just had, why not make a select few items convert magical damage type(s) into physical? It would probably break a few things but the idea sounds nice.
No, my secondary is Occultist, I just haven’t put any points in yet. What I meant is that the stats are very spread out, such as pet bonuses that I don’t need, all different damage types, and just in general not many items with a focus on stats that complement my build. I’m still using level 25 pistols, for example, because the few that I’ve found have lower DPS, too many different damage types, mixed stat bonuses that don’t seem to make sense for anyone’s build, etc.
changing gear to being multiplicative damage but with 15-20% instead ----> too imba
Spirit/cunning being multiplicative, about 400% damage ----> fixes problems
???